Something for the Pain

by Gerald Murnane

  Our next bet was on Faithful City again, in a race for two-years-old fillies on Melbourne Cup Day. I have no recollection of the Cup, which was won by Baystone (Dark-blue-and-lilac stripes, red cap), but I recall Faithful City leading all the way in the fillies’ race. Her odds were short: a bit less than two-to-one, but I had increased my bet to eight pounds each way and had won the equivalent of four times my weekly allowance as a student teacher. I was even more anxious by now when I thought of all the other punters who were winning as I was. How could we all keep winning for month after month and year after year? And yet, I had not overheard at any race meeting a single conversation about Form-Plan. When I had stood in the queues to collect my winnings, no one around me had uttered thanks to Mr Maclean. Perhaps there were Form-Plan followers around me waiting to collect, except that they were desperate, as I was, to stop the word from spreading.

  Nowadays, I speculate that most of the buyers of Form-Plan were persons such as I was in those days: workers and lowly public servants and small-time punters, all dreaming of their own versions of my leisurely life in Dandenong Road, Armadale. I speculate further that even Form-Plan, successful though it seemed for a time, was not what they had hoped for when they sent off their ten pounds to Mr Maclean. They had wanted lively betting, action, bets in every race, frequent winners at long odds. They could not foresee themselves retiring early as a result of backing twenty two-years-old horses each year at short odds. As for the real punters—the stable commissioners, the likes of Teddy Ettershank, and the bookmakers especially—if they even read the Sporting Globe, they would have barely glanced at Mr Maclean’s full-page ads. They, the real punters, had seen systems come and go. As a leading bookmaker said to me many years later, ‘I like all punters, but I like systems punters best.’

  I’ve given away already the end of my story. After Melbourne Cup Day, we got stuck on a plateau for several months. We backed winners, but we backed even more losers, a few of them unplaced, which was doubly costly. The last Form-Plan horse that I backed ran at Flemington one wet day in the autumn of 1959. I forget its name but its colours were All brown and it was trained by one of the famous Hoysted family at Wangaratta. Its odds were eight-to-one, the longest I had ever been offered against a Form-Plan horse. If the horse had won, the system would have been in profit again, but the horse never flattered at any stage.

  It would be easy to dismiss a betting method such as Form-Plan, and most of its disappointed followers surely did so. I would be fairly confident, though, that the average small punter who tries to back the winner of every race would be considerably better off at the end of each year after following Form-Plan or some similar method than after throwing his or her money at horse after horse in race after race. I even wish I had kept my old Sporting Globe collection for a few years afterwards and had checked the results of Form-Plan during the years after I had abandoned it. I don’t recall when the ads for the system disappeared from the Sporting Globe, but I recall my receiving a newsletter from Mr Maclean at some time in 1959. He had decided to change some of the rules of his method. We were no longer to back horses starting from wide barriers or on days when the track was heavy. Needless to say, these rules would have prevented me from backing several losers during months past. The last message that I received from Mr Maclean was another newsletter. He had devised a completely new method of systematic betting. Results for the past few years were outstanding. Persons who had previously purchased Form-Plan could buy the new system at a discounted price. I decided that the man was incorrigible and a rogue, but that was a few years before I read Otto Fenichel’s book. Now I incline to the belief that poor Mr Maclean was truly desperate to learn how he stood with God.

  11. Lickity and the Eccentric Aunt

  ONLY TWICE DURING my long lifetime have I intercepted from someone a look of admiration for my—what should I call it?—not wisdom but sagacity, perhaps, or shrewdness. And, strange to tell, I was grudgingly admired on both occasions on account of my involvement with Lickity (Cerise, gold hoops and cap).

  I may have seemed ambivalent towards Teddy Ettershank in an earlier section, but the story of Lickity shows that Teddy sometimes took my father fully into his confidence, to their mutual advantage. Late in 1957, Teddy enlisted my father, and my father even enlisted me, in a carefully planned, massive, and ultimately successful off-course betting plunge.

  Illegal off-course bookmakers operated in every suburb and town in Victoria for decades before the introduction of the TAB in 1961. At the Royal Commission that preceded the establishment of the TAB, one illegal bookmaker said in evidence that his annual turnover exceeded two million pounds. The report of the commission estimated that the total off-course turnover was at least three times the on-course turnover. And this was at a time when race meetings attracted crowds unheard of today. The off-course men were known as starting-price, or SP, bookmakers because they paid winning bets according to the odds on offer at the racecourse at the start of each race.

  Teddy Ettershank and his mysterious band of followers mostly bet with on-course bookmakers. Teddy and two or three others would rush along the rails at an agreed time, calling out their bets to those leading bookmakers who knew them by name and with whom their credit was good. The aim was to get the best odds available before the weight of money obliged the bookmakers to reduce their odds. Sometimes, when they were betting with a very large sum, Teddy and his men might go along the rails a second time, but then, of course, they would have to accept lower odds and a lower overall return on their outlay.

  Occasionally, Teddy would organise an off-course plunge. My guess is that he did this when the horse to be backed was considered a certainty and when the sum to be bet was huge, even by Teddy’s standards. The advantage of an off-course plunge was that the money all went on at the best available odds. Moreover, if none of the smart men showed his face in the betting ring on course, let alone backed the horse in question with the bookmakers there, then the seeming lack of interest in the horse would cause on-course bookmakers to extend the horse’s odds, thereby increasing the amount to be paid out by the off-course men. The only seeming drawback of an off-course plunge was its needing more men than usual to implement it—men whose credit was good with large off-course bookmakers and who could be trusted to phone their big bets through at the agreed time. This had to be just before the start of the race. (Sometimes a large SP operator was able to cover some of his risk by betting with a leading bookmaker on course. Employees of the biggest SP men went in and out of the turnstiles all day at the racecourse, phoning odds to their boss from nearby houses. Such men could be used to leak money back to the course, as the expression went, which reduced the starting price of the plunge-horse and hence the profit from the plunge.)

  When Teddy was planning his off-course plunge on Lickity, I was working as a temporary clerk in the Bullion Office of the Royal Mint, in William Street, Melbourne. At the desk beside mine was Martin Dillon, who has been mentioned previously. I called him always Mister Dillon, but I’ll call him here by his first name, given that I’m now nearly twenty years older than he was then. I was fascinated by Martin. There were probably thousands like him in Melbourne and in country Victoria, but I had led a sheltered life and he was the first of his kind that I had met. Martin had been brought up as a Catholic in Chiltern, in north-eastern Victoria, but had cheerfully given up his religion at an early age. I had heard of lapsed Catholics, as we called them in those days, but Martin was the first I had met. He and his wife had parted company many years before, and he’d had since then a number of what are nowadays called partners. In newspaper reports of the 1950s, they were called de facto wives or common-law wives, but Martin referred to them as his lady-friends.

  I’d had a girlfriend for a few weeks soon after I began work at the Royal Mint, but for the rest of my time there I was a solitary, and my seeming content to remain so seemed to exasperate Martin. He tried to stir me to action with stories of his own youth. He made much use of t
he verb to court. At my age, in Chiltern, so he told me, he had courted never fewer than two girls at a time, and even in my innocence I understood that to court had for him a wider range of meaning than it had for me.

  One day, I must have tried to explain to him that I had few opportunities to meet girls; that I had once gone alone on a Sunday picnic organised by the youth groups of my parish but had had to consort all day with solitary males like myself, while the young women were guarded by their boyfriends. Instead of answering me, he went into a sort of reverie, brought on, I supposed, by my mention of Catholic youth groups. He leaned back in his chair and said, more to himself than to me, that he had sometimes courted even Children of Mary, and his satisfaction seemed so genuine that I found myself believing his claim, scandalous though it seemed to me. (The Children of Mary was the title of a Catholic sodality, long since disappeared, whose members, all of them older girls or young women, attended mass together on a designated Sunday each month. In the great days of the sodality, a parish church might be more than half-filled with devout young female persons. I was intimidated even by the thought of such a gathering and kept well away from the church whenever the young females were assembled there but sometimes, on my way to a later mass, I saw a single Child of Mary or a small group going home through the quiet streets, each wearing the regalia of the sodality: a blue hood that reached below the waist and was topped by a sort of white veil, or so I seem to recall—I never got close enough to observe the details.)

  When Martin Dillon wasn’t trying to convert me to his way of life, we spent much of our time talking about racing. He went to every Saturday meeting and even took a day of his annual leave sometimes when he wanted to back a particular horse at a weekday meeting. On many a day while we were side by side at our desks, I would hear him phoning a bet to his SP bookmaker, whose name I still recall: Charlie Cotton. Martin knew a few small-time trainers and hard-bitten old stable hands and was sometimes tipped a winner. I resented his thinking I was no more than a mug punter and told him sometimes that my father knew some smart men around Flemington.

  My father’s SP bookmaker at that time was a man named Hughie Thomas. Hughie was no minnow as a bookmaker, and my father was prepared to phone to Hughie, five minutes before Lickity’s race, a sizeable bet for Teddy and himself. On the evening before the race, my father gave me ten pounds (rather more than five hundred dollars in today’s currency) and asked me to have Martin Dillon put the money on Lickity with his bookmaker. I was to pretend to Martin that an eccentric aunt of mine, who knew nothing about racing, had been tipped that the horse had a winning chance and had asked me to back it for her. I was not to hand over the money until ten minutes before the start of the race, as though the matter had slipped my mind until then.

  All went as planned. Martin phoned my bet to Charlie Cotton, but he, Martin, reported to me with some surprise Charlie’s telling him, when Lickity’s name was mentioned, that a punter, only minutes before, had asked to have a huge amount on the horse. Charlie had had to limit the punter to a fraction of what he wanted to bet. When I heard this, I was surprised that Martin had not decided to have a small bet on Lickity for himself. Did he still believe my story about my aunt? Had it not yet occurred to him that the junior in the Bullion Office might, for once, be privy to valuable knowledge?

  One last detail needs to be mentioned. The horses that Teddy and his men backed were mostly at short odds. The amount that they bet was such that a winner at three-to-one would give them an excellent result. Given that Teddy had told my father Lickity could not be beaten, we—my father and I—expected the horse to start at about two-to-one. The race was a good-quality maiden race at Warrnambool, and Lickity would have been about three-to-one in early betting. However, he was friendless in the ring, to use a racing expression. Not only did no big bettors want to back Lickity, but Teddy himself was at the meeting and made a great show of backing Lickity’s nearest rival with several hundred pounds in cash. The laws of supply and demand operate unfailingly in the betting ring. Since no one seemed to want to back Lickity on course at Warrnambool, the bookmakers there lengthened his odds, hoping to tempt punters.

  Meanwhile, all over Victoria and New South Wales, punters in the know were waiting to bet as much as their bookmakers would allow them on Lickity and, if the horse won, the bets were going to be paid at the odds being offered at Warrnambool when the race began.

  Martin Dillon was always able to hear a broadcast of a weekday race if he was interested. A group of dedicated punters had a radio hidden somewhere in the Coining Hall or the Melting Department of the Mint. After he had backed Lickity for me, he went off to hear the race. I, being the boy around the place, stayed at my desk. When Martin came back, he seemed unusually thoughtful. He told me that my aunt must have got her tip from a reliable source, given that Lickity had led all the way and had won by four lengths.

  A little later, out of curiosity, he phoned Charlie Cotton to see what the horse’s odds had been. (So well organised were off-course bookmakers that their agents or spies on course could tell them the starting prices within minutes after each race.) I watched Martin while he asked Charlie what Lickity’s odds had been. Martin would have expected, as I did, that the horse had started at around two- or three-to-one. He went on listening to Charlie the bookmaker for a minute or so, and I could see that even such a hardened old punter as Martin was hearing something that surprised him. He put the phone down and swung his chair around so that he faced me. He told me first that Lickity had started at five-to-one. Then he told me that Charlie had heard already on the grapevine that all the big SP bookmakers in Melbourne and Sydney had been taken by surprise and faced huge payouts. The plunge on Lickity had been one of the biggest and best-planned for years. And then I intercepted the first of the looks that I mentioned earlier.

  I worked with Martin Dillon for only a few weeks after Lickity’s win. In the new year, I left the Mint to begin a course at a primary teachers’ college. During my last weeks with him, Martin seemed to have decided that I was not quite the girl-less, gormless teenager that he had taken me for. He even grinned at me sometimes and asked me to pass on to him any further tips that my aunt received.

  Lickity had a short spell after his lucrative win and did not race again until the autumn of 1958. His next start was to be at Bendigo, in a stronger field than he had beaten at Warrnambool. This time there would be no huge plunge, but Teddy had told my father to back the horse with confidence. I told my father I could easily take a day’s sick leave from the teachers’ college, and he entrusted me with twenty pounds. My father sometimes exhibited a mild paranoia in racing matters. He warned me to stay well away from the rails bookmakers where Teddy and his men would be betting. Teddy had not set eyes on me since I was a boy of ten, but my father was afraid that Teddy might recognise me and might be annoyed if I seemed to be putting mine and my father’s money on before the smart men had got theirs on.

  I travelled to Bendigo on one of the buses that for many years took racegoers to country meetings from opposite Ball and Welch’s store in Flinders Street. Most of the passengers were elderly, but the man who sat beside me and began a conversation was in his late twenties. He was good company, and we talked for most of the trip. He was an accountant from Wollongong, a bachelor taking his annual holidays alone but on public transport in order to meet people. He was going to the races but was going to stay in Bendigo for a few days to see the sights, as he put it. I told him that I had lived in Bendigo as a small boy, which was true, and that I was hoping to meet up at the races with family and friends from former times. This was not at all true. I had no relatives in Bendigo and had lost all contact with former friends. The only persons who might have been pleased to meet me at the races were the Bourke brothers. They were licensed bookmakers and also SP men. When my father had taken us away in haste from Bendigo ten years before, he had owed the Bourke brothers a huge amount. Perhaps they could have taken me hostage and sent a ransom note to my father. I
am only joking—but when I did see one of the Bourke men in the distance later that day, I turned away at once. I could not have dared to look him in the eye.

  The accountant and I did not stay together at the races, although we watched a few races from the same vantage point. I told him nothing about Lickity. My responsibility was to get my bet on quietly at the back of the ring and, if all went well, to collect my winnings quietly afterwards. There was no saying what the man from Wollongong might have done if I had told him to have a modest bet on Lickity. I thought of accountants as wealthy men. For all I knew, he might have had a roll of notes on him and might have launched a plunge of his own.

  Lickity was again at generous odds, perhaps because his opposition was stronger. His opening odds were three-to-one, but these soon lengthened. I added five pounds of my own to my father’s twenty. I found a man betting four-to-one in the back row and backed Lickity to win a hundred pounds. I kept away from the accountant and watched the race alone. Lickity led all the way and won almost as easily as he had won at Warrnambool.

  I had obeyed my father’s instructions and had kept away from the rails bookmakers, but my betting with a man at the rear of the ring had the disadvantage that I had to collect my winnings in view of the crowd passing to and fro on the main lawn. I had collected my bundle of notes and was folding them into my pocket when I saw the accountant watching me from a distance. Another sort of man might not have felt obliged to say anything, but I have always tried to cover my embarrassment by talking. I walked over to the man and began to tell him about my eccentric aunt. I had met her before the last race…She didn’t like betting with bookmakers and had asked me to bet for her…The more I talked, the more foolish I sounded, but the man from Wollongong was too polite to challenge my story. He was, it seemed, rather impressed, for he gave me the second of the two looks mentioned earlier.